XXXIV

But in the sense of common people, not all the universe is called body, but only such parts thereof as they can discern by the sense of feeling, to resist their force, or by the sense of their eyes, to hinder them from a farther prospect. Therefore in the common language of men, “air” and “aerial substances,” use not to be taken for “bodies,” but (as often as men are sensible of their effects) are called “wind,” or “breath,” or (because the same are called in the Latin spiritus ) “spirits”; as when they call that aerial substance, which in the body of any living creature gives it life and motion, “vital” and “animal spirits.” But for those idols of the brain, which represent bodies to us where they are not, as in a looking-glass, in a dream, or to a distempered brain waking, they are, as the apostle saith generally of all idols, nothing; nothing at all, I say, there where they seem to be; and in the brain itself, nothing but tumult, proceeding either from the action of the objects, or from the disorderly agitation of the organs of our sense. And men that are otherwise employed than to search into their causes, know not of themselves what to call them; and may therefore easily be persuaded, by those whose knowledge they much reverence, some to call them “bodies,” and think them made of air compacted by a power supernatural, because the sight judges them corporeal; and some to call them “spirits,” because the sense of touch discerneth nothing in the place where they appear, to resist their fingers: so that the proper signification of “spirit” in common speech, is either a subtle, fluid, and invisible body, or a ghost, or other idol or phantasm of the imagination. But for metaphorical significations, there be many: for sometimes it is taken for disposition or inclination of the mind; as when for the disposition to control the sayings of other men, we say “a spirit of contradiction”; for a disposition to uncleanness, “an unclean spirit”; for perverseness, “a froward spirit”; for sullenness, “a dumb spirit”; and for inclination to godliness and God’s service, “the Spirit of God”: sometimes for any eminent ability or extraordinary passion, or disease of the mind, as when “great wisdom” is called “the spirit of wisdom”; and “madmen” are said to be “possessed with a spirit.”